parrotfish

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. Any of various brightly colored tropical marine fishes, especially of the family Scaridae, having fused teeth resembling a parrot's beak.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. Any of several tropical marine fish of the family Scaridae known for their beak-like mass of teeth used to scrape algae from rocks or coral.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n.

n. Any of several gaudy tropical fishes of the family Scaridae having parrotlike beaks formed by fusion of teeth.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. A name given to various fishes, principally of the families Labridæ and Scaridæ, on account of their colors or the shape of their jaws.

n. A name given in Australia and elsewhere to Scarus pseudolabrus: called in the Australian tropics parrot-perch. In Victoria and Tasmania the name is also given to several species of Labrichthys. In New Zealand, the parrot-fish is Pseudolabrus miles psittacula.

Some were truly incredible — from the impossibly tiny-mouthed filefish (No. 32), to the blue parrotfish (No. 35) that looked like wet sapphire, to the 2-foot-long remora (No. 34) that Adler insisted could adhere to my belly and hang there (it did, and the sensation was like having a vacuum-cleaner hose with a thousand tiny needles at its end stuck to your skin).

"There are some locations where lionfish have totally altered the biodiversity of a reef," said James Morris, a NOAA ecologist at the agency's Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research in Beaufort, N.C. As a top predator, it consumes juvenile snapper and grouper along with algae-eating parrotfish, all of which help keep reefs healthy.